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2001-11-29

Tomorrow is my last day of work! Yay! Today some people are taking me out to lunch, a little shower-type well-wishing thing. Kind of odd, but nice. I don't always feel comfortable being the center of attention but this feels okay. It's only about nine people. Will I get good loot?

Tuesday night we took a tour of the hospital, a public university teaching hospital. They are opening a new building--they were actually supposed to open it months ago but it's been delayed--and the fact that this is the old facility certainly shows. It was shabby as hell, pretty depressing. A couple of the labor and delivery rooms are newer than the others; they are larger and have showers and are not quite so dreary. I really hope I get one of those. Having toured the birthing center and seen the nice, homey rooms there, I guess raised my expectations a bit. But I think this will probably be fine. Some good music should go a ways toward improving the environment; we're thinking about an all Velvet Underground labor.

On the pain topic, or perhaps I should say the discomfort topic, well, things progress. The books tell me that the baby is due to "drop" this week. Dropping is the same as "engaging" or "lightening" and essentially means that the kid's head settles down into the pelvic cavity, decreasing pressure on some of the upper organs, like my stomach, and increasing pressure on my bladder. Let me just say that's a bit hard to imagine, given the near-constant need to pee I've been experiencing.

On Sunday the pregnancy group got together, with babies. (I am the last to pop.) Considering that seven women and six babies were in one fairly small room for two-plus hours, it was remarkably calm. The babies were very mellow and quiet. Lots of boobs flashing. Oh, speaking of flashing, we decided to take some photos and one woman was insistent that, despite the poor lighting, we not use a flash. Her reasoning: her baby had yet to be exposed to a flash, she thought it would be too jarring for him. (The sound you hear now is me rolling my eyes.) But anyway, one woman's husband dropped her off so we got him to shoot a few and he inadvertently set off the flash; so much for the flash virginity of that child. You can see a photo here.

For some reason I may soon understand (or not), these new mothers seem reluctant to drive. So their husbands dropped them off or, in the case of two who live near me, I gave rides. The ones I drove have babies two and four weeks old and really scared me with tales of how little they are able to accomplish during the day. Especially the one with the four-week old. I listened, mildly aghast, as she described her days, and felt sympathy, then something akin to dread realizing that may well soon be me.

I started thinking there's no way I will be so incapacitated, but then I thought that this is probably what everyone thinks until it happens to her. You know, the way that everyone about to have chemotherapy secretly thinks that her hair won't fall out.

But then yesterday I talked to a woman I work with who had a kid about a year ago. She said the first two weeks were rough but after that she was doing all kinds of stuff. "You're hearty stock," I said. "So are you!" she said. Let's hope she's right.

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